


A Series of Farewells

by Commander_Fabulous



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Mind Control, Minor Character Death, My First Fanfic, Not entirely sure I should tag Kilgrave as Zebediah Killgrave, What with him being called Kevin in the TV Show
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-19 02:58:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8186797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Commander_Fabulous/pseuds/Commander_Fabulous
Summary: “Who are you?” he paused, regrouping at the presence of not-Jessica, “What are you doing in Jessica’s apartment with all the lights off?”
  
  “The lights are off to suggest no-one is here,” the man spoke with a comforting accent, warm and wholesome, but concealing coldness in its words, “And you couldn’t take a hint.”

 
 
 
 
An innocuous beginning to a series of snapshots from the lives and times of those who come into contact with Kilgrave, and quite how everything falls apart.





	1. Ruben

Ruben was staring at the ceiling, counting the individual mould patches from the last time the boiler upstairs had started leaking. He did this every time he was waiting for something, it helped him relax. Last time it was fourteen, but now he could see a fifteenth pinprick of black and green bubbling up on the warped plaster in the corner of the ceiling. Robyn would be angry –again– at how long the repairmen were taking, but he liked the way the patterns spread and took on new shapes. It was like a little ecosystem just for him.  
  
He smiled broadly as the kitchen timer let out its dull clanging alert. He pushed himself up from the battered sofa and made his way into the dingy kitchen that always smelled faintly of burned popcorn. Robyn had instituted a blanket ban on popcorn in the flat ever since The Incident, but he was still allowed to make banana bread. He snatched up the oven glove from the kitchen sideboard and in measured movements pulled open the oven door with a rattling squeak. There was always a knack to it, something that his sister hadn’t quite figured out. He heard her surreptitiously banging around in the kitchen sometimes.  
  
Ruben inhaled deeply and let the warm, fruity aroma wash over him. Underneath the body of the scent there was a faint nutty undertone, not too strong, he hoped. Pulling the tray out of the oven, he deposited the loaf onto one of Robyn’s favourite floral patterned plates. It thumped satisfyingly onto the hard ceramic and as he cut a slice from it, the porous bread steamed invitingly.  
Ruben took a small bite and the familiar taste flowed comfortingly through him.  
  
“That is good,” he mumbled, chewing carefully.  
  
He hoped Jessica would like it.  
  
  


A faint, persistent, scratching noise disrupted his thoughts and he looked to the living room to find Cathy staring back at him through a crack in the door with doleful eyes. She twitched her nose inquisitively.  
  
“Cathy, what are you doing here you naughty girl?” he cried, moving to open the heavy wooden door.  
  
She scampered gratefully through and nuzzled at his shoe. Ruben scooped her up in his oven-gloved hands and let her sniff his nose. The chinchilla wiggled its ears meditatively.  
  
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Ruben asked her, pointing Cathy towards the loaf of banana bread sitting on the counter.  
  
Cathy, resolutely unimpressed by the bread, instead chose to wriggle comfortably into Ruben’s hands. He sighed and placed Cathy gently on the counter as he began the process of cleaning up. The chinchilla shuffled over to the plate and nibbled inquisitively at a corner of the loaf.

“Oh, so now you like it,” Ruben admonished, closing his hands around Cathy and pulling her away from the plate, “That’s going to play hell with your diet little miss.”

Ruben walked swiftly through the cramped apartment, stepping into his room to find the plastic top to Cathy’s tank sitting askew, warm air rippling gently as it spilled into the room. He knelt down and shooed the recalcitrant rodent into the rocky habitat he had constructed for her.

“So you’ve figured out the lock on this house too. Cathy...” he chided the twitchy, be-whiskered face which peeked out from a crevasse in her hiding place. “Well, so long as you don’t go chewing on any more cables, we won’t let Robyn know about this, hmm? It’s good for you to get a chance to run around once in awhile.”

Ruben stretched and felt his knees crack as he pushed himself upright.

“But for now, daddy has places to be.”

He strode back into the kitchen and picked up the cooling plate of banana bread, wrapping it in cling film in easy, practiced movements.

“Don’t you worry Cathy,” he called into his room, where the irascible chinchilla was in the process of dust-bathing, “I’ll be back shortly.”

He looked at the checklist of necessities his sister had left on a whiteboard next to the door as he grabbed his keys.

“Keys, check,” he jangled them in his hands.

“Reason to leave the flat, check.” Banana bread was his game, and distribution was his aim.

“Pants, ch-” Ruben glanced down. His bare legs shone back in the wan light of the apartment, reminding him of the societal norms that did, in fact, exist.“Right, right,” he muttered to himself, adjusting his diaper, “pants first, then going outside. Shame is pain, as Mother always said.”  
  
  


Ruben stared at the darkened apartment beyond the frosted glass. The letters ‘Alias Investigations’ remained inscrutable. He had spent several minutes in the mildewed corridor listening intently, trying to deduce if Jessica was actually out, or if she was merely in a drunken torpor. And if she was drunk, would she appreciate the gift of banana bread, or would it be wasted? If she was out, could he leave it here? Would Malcolm take it again? The last time he left something for Jessica, Malcolm had returned the plate two days later saying the cakes tasted like Lucky Charms. Which was certainly... a critique. Still, he seemed on the up and up these days. But then again-  
  
Ruben froze, straining his ears.  
  
Beyond the thrum of the central heating and the faint knocking of elderly piping, the unmistakable sound of someone urinating. At least. Ruben’s face scrunched as he concentrated. Probably urinating. Still, at least she was in, no chance of her banana bread being eaten by an ex-junkie this time!  
  
Ruben knocked. It was a polite yet pertinent knock, one that begged an answer. After several seconds absent of response Ruben began to doubt himself and knocked again, louder this time.  
A figure emerged from the gloom of Jessica’s apartment and stood for a moment, outlined against the deeper darkness. As Ruben moved to knock again, the door swung inwards, and Ruben drew in a breath to speak.  
  
“Who are you?” he paused, regrouping at the presence of not-Jessica, “What are you doing in Jessica’s apartment with all the lights off?”  
  
The two men took a moment to size each other up. Ruben’s opinion of the stranger was immediately negative. All sharp suits and perfectly sculpted hair, with dazzling cheekbones and deep blue eyes; Mother had warned him about such men. They were all invariably lawyers, parasites, or both as the case might be.  
  
“The lights are off to suggest no-one is here,” the man spoke with a comforting accent, warm and wholesome, but concealing coldness in its words, “And you couldn’t take a hint.”  
  
“Because someone is here. But not Jessica?” Ruben replied slowly.  
  
He was trying to figure out what to do. Obviously, he should leave. This wasn’t a social situation he was prepared for and his sister would be angry at him for talking to strangers if she found out. But he was also a mysterious stranger in Jessica’s apartment. Maybe he should call the police-  
  
“Tell me. Who are you?”  
  
Obviously he should tell this man who he is. It wouldn’t be polite to leave without introducing himself. He could call the police afterwards.  
  
“My name is Ruben, I’m her neighbour.” He paused. Something more was expected of him here.  
  
“I made her banana bread,” he supplied helpfully, holding up the plate for inspection.  
  
“Why?” the man’s carefully neutral expression peeled back into a sneer.  
  
“Because I love her,” Ruben replied. He needed this man to understand that. Suddenly he felt the gesture of banana bread wasn’t enough. There was a desire, he had never known it before, a yawning chasm in his heart he could only fill by telling this man exactly how much he loved Jessica. He opened his mouth to begin and-  
  
“Shut up, step inside,” the man commanded.  
  
  


Ruben stumbled over himself to obey, crossing the threshold into the apartment as his words died in his throat. Why did he need to speak? Words couldn’t convey better than actions. The hunger in his heart roared, demanded more orders, more fulfilment from this man.  
  
A tiny section of Ruben screamed in terror at what was happening, the trapped and caged section of his higher functions. It wasn’t required though, his id snarled, what mattered was the need. The orders.  
Ruben stared expectantly at the man whose gaze was carefully focused upon him.  
  
“What do you know of me? Tell me, now.”  
  
The hunger burned; a branding iron in his mind that he couldn’t stop.  
  
“I don’t, uh, I don’t know anything,” Ruben muttered.  
Why didn’t he know anything? He was a pitiful, miserable waste of flesh. The hunger clawed at him, demanded something, anything.  
  
“You, uh, were breaking into Jessica’s apartment?” he answered, to dull the pain.  
  
The pause filled the room, silence which begged an answer.  
  
“So you don’t know anything about me, you aren’t anyone special. And you love her. Tell me, does she love you?”  
  
“I don’t... I don’t know. I don’t know if she loves anyone,” he replied. So many answers that failed to meet the man’s standards. Why? Why didn’t he know more? The pain of failure trickled through his mind from  
the central, crippling lance compelling him to tell the man anything he desired.  
  
The tiny section of Ruben that still was Ruben screeched and clawed uselessly against whatever was working its way into the corners of his mind, even as it succumbed helplessly.  
  
“Well,” the man drew out the syllables of the word, like a judge considering a sentence, “you have been spectacularly useless then, haven’t you? But! You don’t have to be forever. I have a way to make you very important to Jessica. Would you like that?”  
  
Ruben paused. Somewhere in the depths of his mind where freewill still struggled vainly, the idea of being important to Jessica still mattered. But...  
  
The hunger. The need.  
  
“Would it, would it please you?” Ruben asked, plaintively. The man raised an eyebrow at him, inquisitive.  
  
“Oh yes, very much so.” He smiled, coldly. “Go and put down that, whatever it is. In the kitchen, it’s through there.”

The man pointed Ruben on his way and followed after, his shoes clicking on the wooden floor.

  
  
“Now” the man called out, as the plate touched the worktop, “find yourself a knife. A big one. Your choice.”  
  
Ruben’s hunted feverishly over the worktop, finding nothing beyond dirty plates and empty bottles, he started slamming through drawers, the contents rattling as he pawed through them. A potato slicer left a gash on his thumb as he scraped it aside. The wound quickly welled up red, and thin droplets of blood marked Ruben’s hunt.  
  
Somewhere inside the cage where his mind sat trapped, he hoped Jessica wouldn’t mind the mess. At last, in the bottom drawer he found what he was looking for, a long, cruel looking breadknife. The serrated edges were sharp, glinting in the streetlight through the window. The burning desire placated for a moment. Ruben sighed.  
  
“Very nice,” the man commented, as Ruben stood up. “Now I want you to go through into Jessica’s bedroom, I want you to lie down on her bed, and I want you to saw your throat open.”  
  
Ruben took a step into the space but the man stopped him for a moment, gripping his arm like a vice.  
  
“That will teach you, for loving someone above your station; you pathetic weasel of a man.”  
  
Ruben nodded and the man left without another word.

  
  
Ruben strode into the room; it was lived in, but bare of emotional ties. The sheets were plain, and no personal belongings beyond the strictly functional adorned the room. He noticed the fact she hadn’t plugged in her phone charger. Hopefully that wouldn’t be a problem later. The tiny, formerly terrified part of Ruben had entered a catatonic state of shock.  
  
Ruben sat down on the bed and the tendrils of need gripped him tighter. The springs gave slightly, and he shuffled over to the other side. As he settled, he brought the knife up, looking at it in the pale light through the curtains. Dust motes whirled around from where he had sat down.  
  
As the reality of what the hunger that wrapped its tendrils around his mind was going to do hit him with full force, the shocked portion of his mind shook itself from the chains of fear and began to struggle.  
What about Cathy? Who would look after her? She never liked Robyn, and changes to their habitats could make chinchillas stressed. She might not eat well, she might die.  
  
The knife came closer to his neck. It glinted softly in the dull light.  
  
What about Robyn? She needed him. He needed her. They were always together, how would she survive without him? He needed to- He had to be there for-  
  
The steel of the blade was cold, so cold, against his throat.  
  
A tear welled up, but the hunger demanded to be satisfied. The pain was sharp, screeching agony, dulled by the joy of completing the man’s task.  
  
He hoped Robyn would be okay. He hoped it with all of his heart.  
  
As the blade sawed deeper, thick crimson washed onto the sheets, rivulets spilling over his prone form. Despite the pain, he didn’t shake. He had been told to lie down.  
Robyn had always been strong. Always knew what to do. She would be fine.  
  
The blade began to catch and stick in the wound, slick blood caused his grip to loosen. The need swelled; a crescendo of desire to be fulfilled. It wouldn’t do to stop now. He pulled the knife free, and set it to his throat again.  
  
The blood flowed slower. Sawing was so difficult now, why?  
  
But as the life blood ebbed from his body, so too did the hunger. It faded, satisfaction a warm afterglow as Ruben’s vision dimmed.  
  
He hoped-  
  
Ruben coughed blood, it spattered thinly across the bed.  
  
He hoped Jessica wouldn’t mind the mess.


	2. Louise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Hello, Kevin,” Louise’s words stuttered slightly as they fell from her mouth. They felt... hollow, even as she said them. But what else could she say? They had spent several seconds in awkward silence, water lapping at the soles of their feet._  
> ...  
>  “Have they... been giving you enough to eat?” she asked. 
> 
> The second in a series of glimpses into the minds of those Kilgrave has controlled, now featuring Louise Thompson.

Louise stood next to Albert in the cold, sludgy alleyway between two tall grey buildings and inhaled slowly. Behind her the taxi that Jessica had hired screeched away, leaving the trio alone in the shadows of spidery metalwork and brutalist concrete. She opened her mouth to say something, but Jessica had already started striding purposefully away, towards a non-descript metal door.

“Are you guys coming or what?” she called over her shoulder. 

Louise sighed. She had barely met Jessica Jones, but she could see the steel in her, tempered by the grim fire of determination. It made her a force to be reckoned with.  
She remembered having that drive herself, once upon a time. 

“We don’t have to do this, you know." She was snapped out of her reverie by a hand gripping her shoulder. Albert stared down at her, concern cutting deep into his brow, "Jessica can handle him, we can leave, live our lives,” he grumbled.

“What lives Albert?” she replied, turning to face him, “we’ve been on the run for the last twenty years, every second waiting for the words ‘stop right there’ to literally stop us in our tracks. That isn’t a life I can keep living. We have to finish what we started. We do.”

She lifted his hand off of her shoulder, and held it tightly. Louise, though a shadow of her former self, had stoked the long extinguished flames of her zeal. Someone had to be the strength, and Albert couldn’t shoulder the burden. 

“You understand, don’t you?” she offered a crooked smile. 

Albert gently touched the side of her face that had been ruined decades ago, and she did her best to not flinch from his hands. Sometimes she still woke up screaming. 

“I do,” he muttered. 

“Let’s go lovebirds, come on!” Jessica shouted from the doorway.

“Well she certainly has brusqueness to compliment her utter lack of civility,” Alfred harrumphed. 

Wordlessly Louise pulled her husband towards the open doorway, a wry smile on her face. 

 

The building was cold, dark, and exuded an unwelcoming air. As the couple made their way through deserted corridors lit by filthy windows and rooms that showed telltale signs of systematic abandonment by those who had come before, the one thing that struck Louise was the complete lack of sound in the building. There were no humming machines, or grumbling pipes and even the sound of the traffic outside was muted to faint whisperings at the edge of hearing. The only exception was the faint sound of dripping somewhere in the bowels of the building, like someone had failed to turn off the last tap as they had left. 

Desolate, that was the word. 

She shivered, and Albert wrapped a comforting hand around her own. She looked up at him and he smiled back warmly, before glancing away again, lost in his own thoughts.

 

As Jessica stomped around another uniform corner, she shouted the words,  
“We have our proof!” to an unseen audience. 

“For Hope’s sake you better be right, the DA said she turned down the plea. She’ll seek two life sentences now,” a voice muttered back, the words echoing through the dull grey chamber.

“She’ll lose,” Jessica replied simply, before shouting back to Louise and Albert, “Come on in!”

Instinctively Louise took the lead, letting Albert trail behind, and as she approached her breath was drawn from her like blood from a re-opened wound. Dreamlike steps took her towards the huge tank that dominated the room, as the words of Jessica and the other woman faded to background noise.

The colder, analytical side of her brain took in the workspace. It was dominated by what she recognised as a sealed containment chamber, some of the more troublesome, or troubling, subjects in her scientific days had required them. This one was a CDC job, the telltale marks of their signature ‘Big ‘n’ Brutal’ design style – a term she heard coined at a conference by one of their representatives – were all over it. She also recognised the snare of wires, computers and the large camera that fed away from its power supply. Jessica, and whoever had helped her, had turned the containment unit into a prison under permanent observation.

But it was what was inside the prison which had drained her utterly.

 

She felt the world fall away around her as she stood in front of him. The words ‘Help Me’ had been written on the glass, smudged brown and deep red, and Kevin stared out from behind them.

Kevin.

Twenty four years, three months and sixteen days. She had counted every moment since she had seen him last, but his face was still emblazoned onto her mind.

He was different now, the fundamental difference of no longer being ten years old. His pudgy face had worn comfortably into middle age. But behind the facile changes of age, she could see in his eyes the same coldness. The same distance, like he was observing a particularly irritating insect.

She could feel her heart hammering in her chest, and her vision swam sickeningly. Instinctively she reached out and touched the glass, and on the other side Kevin held his hand up to hers. The glass felt slick under her fingertips, like it could give way and she would be touching her son’s hand for the first time in decades. 

She recoiled.  
And the world snapped back into focus, to the sound of the dourly dressed, dourly faced woman speaking. 

“It’s not worth the risk,” she spoke in clipped, urgent tones, “we need to find another way.”

“We are going in Albert. He’s our responsibility,” Louise replied not to the woman, but to her husband, who stood fearfully in the middle of the room, his brain stuck somewhere between the ‘freeze’ and ‘flee’ reactions of the id. Seconds ticked past.

“Hands above your heads,” a man emerged from the shadows of the corridor, pointing a gun at the group scattered around the containment unit.

Albert froze in place with a look of panic in his eyes. Louise sighed; he was always one to let other people make his choices for him. 

“I see you got my evidence,” Jessica deadpanned at him. 

“Oh yeah. You convinced me you are one sick lady. Now open that cell,” the man called the shots like he owned the place, and judging from the fact he was clearly some kind of policeman, he technically did at this juncture. From the outside this almost certainly looked like some kind of twisted crime, and it was. But Kevin didn’t... couldn’t be held to normal standards of justice. 

“Sure thing, one second,” Jessica smirked in an off-hand manner, “Trish!”

Another woman, this one blond and thrumming with determination through her very being stepped from the gloom directly shielded by the entryway into the room, and pressed a gun to the detective’s back. He raised his hands, and Jessica snatched his gun from him, before proceeding to rifle through his pockets like a human tempest. 

“Are you insane?” the dour woman’s face had twisted like she had swallowed a lemon. 

Louise sincerely wished she knew who more than half of the people in this room were. All this tawdry drama in the background was utterly distracting from the actually important matters she had to deal with.  
As the detective was cuffed to a pipe jutting from the wall the morose woman continued with her sour speech, 

“You know why don’t you just cuff me right now, because I am about to call nine one one.”

At this, Jessica twitched slightly, and the thin patina of calm that she held over her effervescent anger popped like a soap bubble. 

“Well then,” she sneered, “I will make sure to tell them you’re an accomplice to kidnapping.”

The woman’s eyes flashed intensely, but she subsided into citric animosity. Jessica turned to the chained detective. 

“Keep your eyes on the man in that cell. Your testimony is going to put him away.”

The detective shrugged helplessly, gesturing to his handcuff with his free hand.

“Now let’s give him something to witness. Come on.”

She gestured to Albert, and Louise walked to his side, gripped him by the arm and steered him towards the airlock. As she manoeuvred her husband into action, her other hand slipped to her pocket and felt the cold metal inside. She clutched it so tightly her hand started to shake. 

 

Jessica spun the handle of the airlock, and it hissed seamlessly open for the three of them. As Louise stepped through she was inexorably drawn back to... to before. 

Their house in England had never been hugely extravagant. For all that others might have assumed that a pair of privately funded scientists would be living in the lap of luxury, the very nature of their work necessitated a life free of glitz and glamour, even from the relative anonymity of the scientific press. So they had camouflaged their lives in a middle class suburban existence whenever they weren’t working in the lab. After the Incident, Kevin had asked... ordered to be taken home from his cell. 

He lived in luxury he didn’t understand, waited on hand and foot by his parents; they were refused the ability to leave the house except for the necessities of shopping. Eventually though, Albert had managed to free himself for long enough to return to work each day. Their absence, he had explained to Kevin, who had forced him to grovel on their linoleum kitchen floor, had been noticed at the lab. If at least one of them didn’t return to work, then the money would stop coming in. Kevin had asked why that mattered. 

In hindsight the vision of a thirty year old man who at that time had respectable, slicked back salt-and-pepper hair with his face crushed against the floor explaining the basics of capitalism to a nine year old child would have seemed like the butt of some odd joke. At least, if she hadn’t been hysterically weeping next to her husband; and only until Kevin had told her to stop breathing, because she had annoyed him. 

 

The couple stepped through the door; Albert’s hip protesting at the slight contortion necessary to get through. She could tell, as his grip shifted to her elbow, that he needed her support both physically and mentally in this space. She couldn’t read his mind, but she knew that he would be suffering just as much as she was right now. The guilt was like a physical veil that slowed their steps. 

 

She wondered what she should say, as the Jessica spun open the second door in sure, easy movements. How did you greet someone who you hadn’t seen in thirty years? Whose last words to you were “go to sleep, mother”. She spun out a series of scenarios in her mind: anger, indignation, hysterics, heart-break? Nothing seemed entirely like it would meet the needs of the situation at hand. She had a plan though, she had a responsibility. She would see it through, social awkwardness be damned. 

The door opened. Jessica offered her and Albert a sharp nod of acknowledgement before moving aside. The couple stepped through the door to confront their past mistakes. 

 

“Hello, Kevin,” Louise’s words stuttered slightly as they fell from her mouth. They felt... hollow, even as she said them. But what else could she say? They had spent several seconds in awkward silence, water lapping at the soles of their feet. Kevin seemed legitimately flabbergasted. 

“Mum? Dad?” he asked. 

The pause between them stretched across cavernous seconds again. Automatically, her brain defaulted to social mores that utterly lacked the gravitas to fill the void,

“Have they... been giving you enough to eat?” she asked. 

That was evidently the wrong thing to say, judging from Kevin’s burst of disbelieving laughter. She regretted her words, he was being kept in prison, obviously they weren’t keeping him well. Her heart cried out across the gap of personal distance and difference to comfort her son-

“You might as well ask who fed me when I was ten! Or fourteen! Or twenty five! You never cared then!” he snapped back at her.

And immediately the portcullis to her heart slammed closed again. He hadn’t changed. That would have given her some pause, if he had looked back on what they had did for him with anything other than childish bitterness. Still entitled, still indignant and still utterly self-centred; but she had to try and get through to him. 

“Kevin, sweetheart...” Louise began.

“I used to wonder if you thought about me growing up,” he cut across her, heedless of the fact she had even been trying to speak, “begging for scraps like a dog. Or if you worried when I got sick, or when I was scared. I was all alone mum.” 

Kevin’s face had crumbled into a wounded facade, but behind his wobbling lower lip and indignant, teary voice Louise could read him like a book. Kevin’s glance kept flickering towards the policeman in the corner whenever he thought no one was looking.

“I had to make people feed me, and shelter me, and care for me. That’s how I learned to survive.”

All he had to do was convince him that he was being held unlawfully, and he could get out. And if he could get out... 

“Bollocks Kevin,” Albert snapped, words staccato sharp in the silence. 

Louise twitched slightly as he inhaled angrily. And then her pupils dilated slightly as she realised what he was doing. They could both play the role of wounded parents, but that was simply fuelling his indignant tirade, and giving the police officer the reason he needed to let Kevin out of this box. And then it would all fall apart like it had so many times before. 

Or they could make him angry. He never had been very good at anger management. 

“You always knew how to give orders: Telling us when to eat, when to sleep, when to piss!” Albert, usually meek, had broken into a rare vintage of rage.

“No! Albert-” Louise started. 

“Oh dad,” Kevin’s face contorted into a condescending smirk, “I’ve changed. Jessica taught me how to help people.”

Louise’s gaze flitted to Jessica, who rolled her eyes dramatically. Change was evidently a relative concept the two of them hardly saw eye to eye upon. 

“I saved children,” he paused, letting his eyes well up momentarily. 

“I wondered if that would make you proud of me.”

Louise paused momentarily to swallow the bile brought up by what she was about to say next.

“Of course we’re proud of you Kevin. We love you.”

“Then why did you leave?” Kevin’s scream carried something more genuine than the hollow emotional shell he had been working through so far. Somewhere deep underneath his entitlement, and the manipulation of others, he legitimately didn’t understand why he had been abandoned.

 

The pain flashed before Louise’s eyes. Deep, volatile and furious. She could smell the burning of flesh, and feel the boiling hiss of water as searing rivulets coursed over her skin. Through the agonising thump of pain coursing through her skull, she could see Kevin’s face leering up at her. 

He enjoyed her pain, the twisting, writhing screaming as she tried desperately to pull away from the iron that he had commanded she use on her face. With every iota of her being she struggled, and she came up short. 

She didn’t remember what had caused Kevin to demand such a toll from her. She barely remembered anything from his childhood beyond the scars. Beyond his twisted enjoyment. He had grown in her mind to a terrifying spectre that had hurt her more than he could ever know, and she knew this terrible child had grown into an equally ghoulish adult. One who revelled in the pain and misery he caused. 

What was worse is that she knew it was her fault. 

This meeting though, represented a chance to balance the books. To make right her mistakes and prevent him from hurting anyone else ever again. 

 

Reality intruded into her reverie, and she welcomed the escape. She shook momentarily, all of her convictions torn away. She felt like running, and weeping until her heart had nothing left in it but emptiness. Like she had done before, after they had escaped. 

“Your mother almost died after what you did to her!” Albert shouted back, anger flaring in his eyes. Louise felt a surge of affection for him as he stood up for her.

She couldn’t leave Albert again, like she had when Kevin had left the fires of her heart dead and ashen in the aftermath of her scarring. He had nurtured her back from the brink, and she would not abandon him now. Not again.

“I was ten! I had a tantrum like a normal child! I didn’t know what I was doing, you didn’t explain it to me, you left!”

Kevin’s accusation twisted like a knife in her gut. She hadn’t left. They had fled, which held all of the difference in the world. She had woken up in the back of Albert’s battered hatchback, unable to see. Bandages  
covered her eyes, and all she could remember was Albert’s timorous voice quaking with fear and fury as he spoke frantically about leaving the country. Well, that, and an overwhelming sense of relief. They had escaped. But if they had known the cost, would they have left? That quandary plagued her every day. 

Kevin’s words twisted inside her and warped into a seething hate at the self-entitled monster they had created. Louise stepped forward, her hands held up. Defensive, disarming; calculatedly so. 

“We made a mistake,” she placated. Kevin stared back, face rankled with distrust. 

“I promise, I will never leave you again.”

“Louise!” Albert cried from behind her, “Remember what he did!”

Louise took another step towards Kevin, she caught a brief tremble in his unshakeable demeanour.

“He’s our son, Albert.” Louise spoke with a gentleness that betrayed nothing of the fury in her heart, the bile rising in her throat as she wrapped her arms around Kevin. She could feel him flinching from her touch, trembling like a frightened animal. 

She held him, in spite of every cell in her being screaming at her to run from him in animal fear. Familial duty was more important than wretched instincts. She gave him a brief squeeze, as powerful as she could.  
As she released him she looked into his face, and his eyes betrayed the sheer alien nature of her touch. She wondered briefly the last time anyone had touched him with true affection. Had it been her, almost thirty years ago? She ran her hand gently from his cheek to his jaw, on the side that mirrored that he had ruined so many years ago. 

Kevin brought his hand up to parallel her motion. His touch was rough, unsteady on the warped flesh of her face. 

“I’m sorry I hurt you mum,” Kevin’s voice shook. It could have been real emotion. It could have been. But a single apology didn’t erase the stain of the decades of sin that stained his very core.  
They embraced, one last time. For Louise it contained so much more than she could ever hope to convey in words. Her hands dug into the fabric of his rumpled suit as she pulled him close into her chest. 

“I’m sorry,” she spoke, and her voice shook even as her resolve hardened. 

Apologies were so lacking. They had failed him as a parent. Abysmally so. They had to claim responsibility for the hollow, twisted shell of a man who had terrorised people from the shadows for so long.

“I am so s-sorry. I am so sorry,” she repeated. Words that utterly failed to convey the magnanimity of her feelings.They were an indescribable maelstrom; all she knew was that it felt like her heart was tearing out of her chest. 

The scissors in her pocket weighed heavily as her hand tensed over them. The moment stretched out. Through the glass she could see Jessica staring at her expectantly. 

She knew what she had to do. Between the shoulder blade and the rib cage, a blade inserted there would puncture the back of the lung, and leave the subject – Kevin – dead in a matter of minutes. 

Breath in, breath out. 

Louise moved faster than she had ever thought possible, tracing the glimmering arc of the scissors.

They thumped into Kevin’s shoulder, and he screamed in shock and pain, a noise beyond the shocked gargle that should have been his only response. 

Louise’s mind rushed to offer hypothesis, useless though they might be. Maybe it was her shaking hands, or Kevin had shifted slightly. Maybe it was lack of experience, she had never stabbed someone living before. 

One fact kept drawing her attention again and again. Human flesh offered more resistance than expected when it wasn’t suffering from the effect of rigor mortis on the dissection table. 

Kevin tore free from her grasp, and the scissors tumbled from the ripped flesh to land at his feet, droplets of blood scything through the air to dissipate into the water. 

“You’re our responsibility, we have got to stop you,” Louise stared into her son’s eyes, her words failed to carry the complexity of that statement. They should have stopped him before. Could have. Would have. She opened her mouth to speak again, to try and make Kevin understand. 

“I understand.” Kevin’s expression was utterly unreadable. 

“Mum,” his words brought back horrible memories of England, years ago. 

“Pick up the scissors.”

“No!” Albert shouted, his words indeterminably ineffectual. She could feel Kevin’s grip on her mind, wrapping its way through old tracks, as though it had never left, and the feeling of helplessness disarmed her utterly.

“Stay there, dad. Take note.”

She could see Jessica outside of the cage, a moment of complete stillness in a maelstrom of emotion from the other people in the room. Louise felt a poisonous twist of envy for Jessica’s control as she stooped to grasp the blood coated scissors.

The bleakly dressed woman with the painfully sour expression was screaming at Jessica as she stared intently at Kevin. Kilgrave. Kilgrave was what he called himself now. It seemed appropriate at this juncture. 

“For every year that you left me alone, stab yourself.”

Twenty four years, three months, and sixteen days. She knew that off hand. She had counted the days since their departure with a heady cocktail of relief and regret.

With little in the way of a flourish, Louise turned the scissors around on herself, and drew a breath. 

Jessica hammered a button on the desk. It didn’t seem to have the desired effect, Louise noted drily, as the scissors thumped into her chest. She felt a wet sucking sensation as the scissors drew from something important. Considering the disconcerting bubbling noise, it had probably been her right lung.

The second blow brought the scissors glancing against one of her ribs, before sliding neatly between any major organs. 

Outside the glass was a swarm of activity, inside, Albert screamed ineffectually. Begging. Poor Albert, he’d never been good at dealing with blood. Something of a drawback in a biologist. Her mind had disassociated with remarkable ease, watching with scientific detachment the agonising pain that tore through her body. 

Another blow, she noted, had pierced the flesh of her heart. Blood had started pumping rhythmically through the wounds in her chest. Realistically she had inside of a minute of consciousness left. 

With piston like efficiency she slammed the scissors home again, even as her knees started to buckle under her. A rush of emotion flowed through her as she realised that she wouldn’t be able to finish Kevin’s task. She felt like laughing, if only her vocal cords weren’t proving to be so defiantly hard to control. 

She slumped forward, collapsing into a foetal position and watched the blood pool around her. The scissors clattered away from her outstretched hand, and her fingers twitched feebly towards them. 

“Don’t just stand there dad, pick up the scissors,” Kevin’s voice had faded to a background hum, like an echo in a deep cave. She felt the grip on her mind slacken, and reached desperately for the blades. She had to protect Albert, at least she could do that.

Albert’s hand snatched them away from her grasp. Behind her she could hear glass shattering, it sounded like the dull tinkling of wind chimes on their porch, from their house so long ago. 

She drew in a shuddering, hacking breath, and knew she was on the brink of death. 

Tears flowed freely from her eyes now. She had failed in her responsibilities, to her family. 

Kevin... through the encroaching darkness, she could see the dark red smear on her hands. She had tried, damnit. For as long as she could remember, they had been running. But now, at the end of it all, as the last smouldering remnants or her life guttered out, she warmed herself knowing that they had tried. 

And as the darkness crept over her, and the last of Kilgrave’s control slithered from her mind, one final thought echoed into the void. 

_But we failed._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a second chapter! Finally! I do apologise for the delay, it's been a rough month or so.  
> So to stave off the creeping dark that is 2016, some light relief via the medium of the horrible, _horrible_ death of another minor character!
> 
> Enjoy!

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a fanfic! It is the beginning of a series of somethings I feel should be written, because I find mindcontrol to be deeply, deeply unsettling, and I feel you should too! So I chose to write some stuff from the perspectives of characters controlled by Kilgrave. We're starting with Ruben, because he was the first person whose end results I stared at and was like "okay, okay no".
> 
> Also, shoutout to both Hawkeye733 and CloudAtlas for beta/proof reading this hot mess and making it more readable! You guys is alright. :3


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